There's a lot to be said for the human touch. It comforts, calms, and for about the last year it's operated your cell phone.
With Apple's glitzy iPhone 2.0 announcement this week, society dives deeper into a new approach with technological interaction. A cheaper price welcomes more users into the touch-operated family of products. The competitors are racing to play catch up.
Buttons are so 2006.
Sensual is sexy, manufacturers have us believe. (So, loosen up the buttons?) Actually, sex therapists have told us this for decades. Relative to whose books you read the world is not flat, and our physical media, especially the Internet, shouldn't be either - at least when printed.
Incidentally exemplifying this thought, an impressive technology was demonstrated during a convention of scholarly publishers last month in Boston. The technology's main purpose is to take images like charts and graphs and make them accessible to those who cannot see them, a review on the Society for Scholarly Publishing Web site said. The software and printer convert charts and clip art to small bumps representing the shape of the graph or image, according to the developing company ViewPlus Technology's Web site. Blind users can feel these printed sheets and notice the slope of a graph or curvature of an image.
As the article is quick to note, the technology stands a great chance at revolutionizing the way all of us use and interpret information.
The thought of understanding by touch is primitive. We quickly comprehend hot from cold, rough from smooth and Clinton from Obama. Number blocks, marshmallows and abaci (counting frames) help us understand basic math. When it comes to analyzing data, a 3-D data representation has great promise. For people particularly troubled with understanding math - namely most journalists - this sort of visual comprehension is remarkably useful.
If products like Apple's iPhone and Microsoft's Surface are any indication, this physical interaction with information is the start of a new technological evolution.
The ViewPlus product is featured this week on the blog of Gerry McKiernan, an Iowa State University science and technology librarian. In a prior and semi-related post, McKiernan points to Sensory Information Navigation as a factor in the Internet's future. While we already use our eyes to pull through Web sites, the potential exists for us to use touch and sound, too.
Imagine smelling your way to a better Google search. You'd never search for random crap again!
McKiernan is one man in a Web of researchers with opinions on everything from Facebook to the Internet on Mars. The wide-scale implantation of this sensory technology is years away, if at all, but to live in a time when it's even a possibility is impressive. Technologies like T9 and the iPhone interface are quickly altering the way we interact with our devices. The life of our QWERTY keyboards and mice are numbered.
And that is only on the input side of the device, let alone the output. In creating a service for the disabled, ViewPlus' printers and software - and products like them - could reinvent the way we interact with information presented in books and papers. And just when we think we've seen all the uses, the porn industry will shock us all with its use of the products.
Sensory is sexy, baby.
Write to Dave atheydave@bewilderedsociety.com
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